The world is your classroom

I want to inspire you to reach farther. Most teachers are limited to their classroom, or to the environment within which they and their students can interact. Some may be fortunate enough to escape from the classroom to lead outdoor education trips, or work within a forest school, spending class time exploring and learning from their surroundings. Some teachers are even lucky enough to conduct a comparative studies trip in a foreign country. Most teachers though, usually find themselves trapped within the four walls of the classroom or lecture hall for much of their working week. And yet with the new social media tools, we can all be worldwide educators. All we need is something important to say, and a tool such as this blog as a vehicle to say it with.

It never ceases to amaze me how many students contact me to say how much they enjoy reading this blog. Some have told me how much it has inspired them to learn more, explore, take risks, and reach further. This kind of positive affrirmation is very important to me and to other edubloggers. Personally, it's one of the main reasons I continue to blog and invest my time in it. Knowing that what I'm writing, and the richness of the subsequent dialogue are having a such positive impact on someone, is one of the main reasons I blog so regularly.

This morning I happened to stumble upon an interesting Twitter stream hashtag - #qaz11 - which I quickly realised was being generated by a group of students in the care of my old friend Jose Luis Garcia (well worth following him on Twitter: @JL3001, over at the University of Cantabria in Spain. Although the tweets were in Spanish, I was able to translate them using Tweetdeck, and I followed for a little while. The students were discussing the merits of the 10 Teaching with Twitter activities I posted on this blog. It was interesting to see them analyse and evaluate the potential of each of the activities within their own professional context as trainee teachers. Without me actually being there, my thoughts were having an impact on the students' learning - my ideas were helping them to frame their thinking, promote discussion and engage critically with the topic.

The same is happening all over the world, every hour, every day as teachers begin to share their ideas and advice, best practice and top tips across a global platform - the blog. We have become a new breed of teacher Quite literally, we are worldwide educators, with students in every country of the world, who read our blogs, think, argue, learn and then go off to try out some ideas. We don't always see them, and we may never meet them, but they are there, and they are learning.

So don't limit yourself to seeing the four walls of your classroom as the full extent of your world. Reach further - and become a worldwide educator. You have the technology.

Multi-media brought the world into your classroom. Social media will take your classroom into the world.

Image source by Woodleywonderworks



The world is your classroom by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

I store my knowledge with my friends

I'm at Colchester Institute on Friday to present a workshop entitled: Communities, Spaces and Pedagogies for the Digital Age. It's for a Learning and Teaching development day the Institute is holding where they will explore the theme of Transformational Learning and Teaching. I have spoken several times on transformation learning, and a few years ago actually brought out a book about the transformational power of ICT in education. It's not an easy subject to tackle, particularly in conservative organisations such as schools and colleges, where change of any kind is looked on either with horror (I don't like change) or a jaundiced eye - (yeah right, as if that's going to make any difference...)

During my workshop, which I'm running twice, I'm going to explore how Web 2.0 tools and new approaches to creating learning space might transform the learning experience of students. I'm going to draw on all I have learnt from my recent overseas trips to challenge the audience to think differently, and in so doing, explore what might be possible in both physical and virtual spaces. The notion of community too, will come under scrutiny - what is it that learning in a social world can offer, and how can we foster communities of practice and interest with our students, not only within groups but across entire continents? I'm going to touch on a number of theories, not least Social Constructivism, but also Connectivism, a theory for the digital age.

I have an excellent quote from Karen Stephenson on Connectivist theory: She says: "Since we cannot experience everything, other people’s experiences, and hence other people, become the surrogate for knowledge". In practice, if you put a number of people in the same room and set them a task, they will all apply their own individual knowledge and experience, and in so doing, the sum of the collective effort will be greater than that which each individual could bring to bear on the task - it's known as distributed cognition - that is, no-one can know everything.

Distributed cognition is a multiplier - as some of the exercises I will facilitate will demonstrate. Stephenson goes on to say: ‘I store my knowledge in my friends’ is an axiom for collecting knowledge through collecting people. Wow - this is just the kind of stuff I do within my own community of practice and it's the social web that helps me to achieve this kind of learning. Notably, on Twitter or other social networking services, we all now have the capability to build up and maintain our own personal learning networks (PLNs) which we can draw upon like a water well, when we need it, with specific questions, whilst at the same time, sharing our own ideas, knowledge and expertise, and in so doing, enriching the distributed knowledge of the entire community.

Applying all of this in practice in authentic learning and teaching situations is the real trick.

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I store my knowledge with my friends by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Learning and teaching with Twitter

I have presented a few workshops now on how to use Twitter as a learning and teaching tool. One of my most viewed blog posts with more than 10,000 hits is entitled Teaching with Twitter so there is a lot of interest in the topic. The question is, how can we harness the potential of this tool in a teaching and learning context? There has been a spectrum of reactions to the workshops I have presented, from the sceptical throught to the enthusiastic, and all of the questions that have been asked are valid and representative of the concerns and issues associated with using any informal tool in a formal context. One question often asked is: How do we use Twitter with children when we can't be sure how open Twitter is? What do we do about maintenance of confidentiality, privacy and the need to protect kids from internet predators? Another question relates to something I posted recently about why Twitter is so powerful. It relates to the need to persist with the tool so that you give it enough time to build up a critical mass of followers and followed, ensuring that your personal learning network (PLN) becomes effective. People have asked how effective Twitter is in developing a PLN, and a live tweetout usually shows them just how effective Twitter can be in connecting you to a world of knowledge, experts and resources. People ask, how much time is involved, and can they afford the time investment? Another concern is about age - some argue that Twitter is more the preserve of older people and that younger people tend to spurn the tool because it doesn't have the attractive affordances of other social networking tools such as Facebook. There is also the issue of instant gratification - how do younger people feel about having to invest in developing their network of followers/followed when it patently takes a lot of effort and time? I'm sure you have a view or two on these issues, and I invite you to post your comments here for others to engage with. In the meantime, here's the slideshow I used at a recent workshop on Teaching with Twitter at the Ulearn Conference in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Teaching and Learning with Twitter

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Learning and teaching with Twitter by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Getting Granular with Twitter

I recently presented two papers at the World Computer Congress in Brisbane, Australia. The first, 'Getting Granular with Twitter' was a paper primarily written by my old friends in Austria, Martin Ebner and Sandra Schaffert and their colleagues, and a very good job they did of making sense of Twitter as a conference back channel and event amplifier. I was delighted to be asked to be involved in the paper and presented it to an audience of educators during the Learn IT strand of the WCC conference. I have now found time to post up the slides (after struggling with Slideshare's protocols, I managed to find a way around them by converting the .pptx file to .pdf) and they have already been receiving some attention from readers since I posted them up last night. I hope you find the slides useful:

Getting Granular on Twitter

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Getting granular with Twitter by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Spanish inquisition

Do you agree that it's important to be acknowledged for the work you have done? I find it particularly rewarding when someone else finds my work useful enough to retweet it on Twitter, or better still write a blog post about it. Linking back to my blog or giving me a name check is all the reward I need. I'm a simple soul. I give my stuff away free, papers, slideshows, images, because I believe in the value of 'share and share alike'. I fully support the ethos of open scholarship and think the world would be a better place if all academic ideas were free and didn't need to be paid for. But that is too idealist for some perhaps. I don't mind other people using my ideas and work as long as they acknowledge where it came from. I'm also open to constructive criticism too, so I can improve things if I need to.

I am particularly proud of some of the "teaching with Twitter" uses I have developed - 'Lingua Tweeta', 'Twitterstalking' and 'Micro-Write' (See Teaching with Twitter from earlier this year). They give description to language tandems and other learner centred activities which can be supported by Twitter. It's easy to use the terms to track other blog posts about these and allied Twitter teaching uses I described in that blog post. One Spanish blog called Clarión recently carried some commentary about my ideas (which were translated into Spanish) and cited the link back to my original post. Clarión's post was subsequently reported by several other blogs in the Spanish speaking world and elsewhere. Unfortunately though, none of them acknowledged the original source. I guess this is the point I start getting a little aeriated. I have also seen slideshows listing my 10 Twitter Teaching ideas without citing the original source. Perhaps I'm wrong, but doesn't this constitute some kind of plagiarism? If my students used a whole list of ideas without citing the source it would be deemed as such. On a blog shouldn't it be the same?

I don't know whether to feel flattered that others have found my ideas so useful they have decided to list them on their blogs and slideshows, or annoyed because they overlooked the original source. You see, as others copy the list across onto their blogs, so my original efforts gain visibility, but my intellectual property rights are increasingly buried. This might sound petty, but I have gone as far as to post comments on some of these blogs thanking the blog owner for finding my ideas useful, and then suggesting politely that they might wish to acknowledge the source. But.... am I being too precious about this? Or do I have a point? Maybe once I have posted an idea to my blog I lose the right to ownership of that idea? And what about intellectual property? Have others had a similar issue with other bloggers using their ideas without acknowledging them? Maybe others could discuss this in more detail. Perhaps I'm too close to the issue to be fully objective.... and after all, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

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